Affective communication in the interaction with touch panel displays could be improved by vibrotactile feedback. Hence, we address the relation between vibrotactile stimuli and affective responses. Specifically, we aim to determine the response to comprehensive vibrotactile stimulus parameters, i.e., waveform, amplitude, envelope frequency, and rhythm, by rating 48 types of amplitude-modulated vibrotactile stimuli according to five affective responses: arousal, comfort, preference, familiarity, and dominance. By determining the effects of each parameter, we found that amplitude and envelope frequency were the most effective parameters triggering affective responses. Amplitude influenced arousal and dominance positively, and comfort, preference, and familiarity negatively. Envelope frequency influenced arousal and dominance negatively. In contrast, waveform and rhythm showed lower effectiveness, which contradicted expected outcomes. Likewise, we verified that affective responses mainly include two dimensions, namely, arousal (and dominance) and comfort (or valence). Overall, the results from this study serve as initial guidelines for designing electronic devices with affective vibrotactile stimuli.

Wood usage and the characteristics of catalog images of wood specimens differ between Sweden and Japan, even though both of them are forest countries. Swedish Kansei, emotional feeling, and Japanese Kansei regarding wood were evaluated using semantic differential methods. Results showed that when assessing wood using tactile sensation, there were tendencies common to both Swedish and Japanese wood specimens. There were differences among wood specimens when assessed visually, and also different tendencies in the assessments of Swedish and Japanese participants resulting from differing opinions of wood grain. Swedish people prefer wood specimens with a grain or knot because these visual elements gave an impression of activity and harmony. Meanwhile, the Japanese prefer a homogeneous appearance. The characteristics of each country’s catalog images of wood specimens are different. For Swedish customers, it can help to choose wood with varying surface appearance; for Japan, it is better to choose wood with tactile sensation.

We used “divergence + relevance” advertising creativity model and environmental response related models to investigate the correlations between green advertising creativity and environmental attitude as well as behavior, and to find the key elements of green advertising creativity. Four pieces of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) advertising were selected as green advertising samples by experts, based on the creativity level. We conducted an experiment with a college student sample (N = 270) in Taiwan by questionnaire. Pearson’s correlation analysis showed that there were significant positive correlations among some WWF advertising. In addition, creativity level had an impact on the correlation results, and divergence was a major indicator of green advertising creativity. We extracted six key elements of green advertising creativity from a typical advertising sample. The key elements were flexibility, artistic value, elaboration, synthesis, meaningfulness, and usefulness. Future work was discussed at the end.

We tested the efficacy of our developed posture-respiration feedback architecture on cardiac and peripheral autonomic nervous system activity. In this system, the posture of a user lying on a bed was regulated adaptively with the rhythm of the user’s respiration in a real-time manner. We hypothesized that such an adaptive posture intervention makes user’s breathing deeper and longer. To investigate the efficacy of this architecture the effects of a respiration-synchronized posture intervention on cardiac and peripheral autonomic system was compared with the effects of asynchronous and constant respiration. Ten healthy males were enrolled in the within-subject experiment with a counter-balanced order. The results indicate that, as hypothesized, the deep breathing was successfully induced when the posture control was precisely synchronized with the user’s respiration. Also, holistically positive efficacy in terms of the reduction in tension and peripheral sympathetic activity was demonstrated.

The education theories in Taiwan during the last 30 years are heavily influenced by trends of postmodern art. Therefore, design teaching that emphasizes practicality has received more attention in national art curriculum. The first author is an elementary school art teacher who have planned T-shirt-design activity for the last 6 years, to analyze students’ design abilities and aesthetic expression in the pseudorealistic stage. On this research, the results of questionnaires were analysis with SPSS 18.0, and interviews were also conducted. The results revealed 77% of students were able to create variations of the provided motifs, reflecting their abilities to create their own designs. The students tended to use pure and warm colors required guidance to create complicated designs. The students demonstrated ability to use Chinese, English, and numbers to convey their thoughts and feelings. The results also showed that the T-shirt-design creative teaching activity could stimulate elementary students’ creativity.

Erratum
EMRVisualization for Patient Progress Tracking:
Interface Design and System Implementation
International Journal of Affective Engineering Vol.18 No.3, pp.117-128 (2019)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is supported by Vietnam National University at Ho Chi Minh City in the project “Development of core technologies for exploiting electronic medical records in Vietnamese” under the grant B2019-42-01.